Groundwater Management Aspects In Bangladesh

In many parts of the world, groundwater resources are ubiquitously available in large volumes of good quality. Developing access to these resources is in such places rather simple and cheap, and often does not entail large governmental coordination or support. These intrinsic hydrological advantages of groundwater give rise to several scale-neutral socioeconomic benefits, making it a favored grass-roots level source. Since few decades, groundwater is the main source of irrigation and one of the key factors making Bangladesh self sufficient in food production. Before 1970s, surface water (e.g., pond, river), rainwater and dug wells were the main source of drinking and domestic water supplies in Bangladesh. During the late 1970s and early 1980s groundwater was introduced in order to avoid contaminated surface water with pathogenic micro-organisms. Thousands of hand-operated tubewells were installed in rural areas of Bangladesh to provide pathogen-free groundwaterfed drinking water supply. The exact number of hand tubewells is not known but an estimated 10 million tubewells exit in the country. The vast majority of these tubewells are private, which penetrate the shallow parts of alluvial aquifers down to depths of 10–60 mbgl (meter below ground level) (DPHE-BGS 2001).

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